20th-century Archaeologist Quotes

We know only too well that all over the world, from wayward undergraduate to B. B. C. producer to publisher's reader there are people, otherwise sensible and sane, people who would not believe in six-headed cats and blood-curdling spectral monsters, who yet read some folly about Noah's ark or Atlantis or cataclysmic world-tides, and say, with a contented sigh, "There may be something in it, you know."

... if scientists could get rid of the mental block which prevents them investigating a vast subject right under their noses, they could soon learn a great deal more than my wife and I are capable of doing.

Thomas Charles Lethbridge

Elie Wiesel has for years served as the moral compass of the civilized world. For many of us, including me, he has defined the Holocaust.

The first Greek-speaking people in the southern Balkan Peninsula arrived in Macedonia, Thessaly, and Epirus sometime after 2600 B. C. and developed, probably due to the extreme mountainous nature of the country, their several different dialects.

David Noel Freedman

Why study this fringe area …? If one considers it worthless, lacking in veracity, won't discussing it give it more credibility than it deserves? If we ignore it, perhaps it will go away.

Stephen Williams

Source Reduction is to garbage what preventive medicine is to health.

Analogy serves to provoke certain types of questions which can, on investigation, lead to the recognition of more comprehensive ranges of order in the archaeological data.

Is it too late for salvation? If not, please let me have the analytical expertise of the New Archaeology — and the humility and common sense of the Old.

Kent V. Flannery

Every archaeologist knows in his heart why he digs. He digs, in pity and humility, that the dead may live again, that what is past may not be forever lost, that something may be salvaged from the wreck of ages.

Lord Akeldama did so love to know all the gossip about the mundane world, but it was in the manner of a cat amusing himself among the butterflies without a need to interfere should their wings get torn off. They were only butterflies, after all.